A presnetation about the project given by N. Aletras, P.D. Clough, S. Fernando, N.Ford, P. Goodale, M.M. Hall and M. Stevenson from the Information School /Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield Sheffield, 6th – 8th September 2012

1. Navigating Cultural Heritage
Collections using Pathways
N. Aletras, P.D. Clough, S. Fernando, N.Ford, P.
Goodale, M.M. Hall, M. Stevenson
University of Sheffield
Information School / Department of Computer Science
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

2. Opening Up Digital Cultural Heritage
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brokenthoughts/122096903/
Carl Collins
http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlcollins/199792939/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/4069633668/
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

3. Opening Up Digital Cultural Heritage
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28481088@N00/3731283554/
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

4. Cutting Paths through DCH
Leeds Town Hall
On The Headrow, sandwiched
between the Central Library and
Henry Moore Institute. The grand
interior houses a notable
collection of fine art and the cafe Leeds City Art
in the recently renovated Gallery – Entrance
Victorian Tiled Hall is well worth a
visit. The unremarkable exterior
architecture is overshadowed by a
large broze sculpture by Henry
Moore.
Leeds City Art
Gallery - Interior
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28481088@N00/3731283554/
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

5. Cutting Paths through DCH
Follow Paths
Explore the
Collection
Share their own
Paths
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28481088@N00/3731283554/
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

6. Our Collections
Collection Language Number & Type of Items
Culture Grid English 547,741 Images
Hispana Spanish 1,129,640 Texts
105,493 Images
Cervantes Virtual Spanish 19278 Texts
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

7. Filtering the Data
• Some items have very limited meta-data
• Tried filtering these to improve the user-
experience
– Discard all items that have no description, or
title < 4, or title repeated > 100 times
– Discard all items that have no
description, and title < 4, or title repeated >
100 times
• Results improved but not quite sufficient
• Plans: Show users “interesting” items first
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

8. Cutting Paths through DCH
Leeds Town Hall
Similar Items
Keywords
Background Leeds City Art
Information Gallery – Entrance
Search facets
Leeds City Art Thesauri /
Gallery - Interior Vocabularies
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

9. Similar Items
• Use Latent Dirichlet Allocation to
automatically determine a set of 700 topics in
the collection
– Similarity calculated based on which topics an
item belongs to
– Show the 25 most-similar topics to the user
• Plans:
– Produce more diverse similar items
– Limit based on meta-data (similar items in the
from the same source, ...)
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

10. Keywords / Search Facets
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

11. Thesauri / Vocabularies
• Existing meta-data is not
consistent in use of thesauri /
vocabularies
• Automatically map to a
number of manually and
automatically generated
thesauri / vocabularies
– LCSH, Wikipedia categories,
DBpedia ontology, Wordnet
domains, Wordnet, LDA-based
hierarchy, Wikipedia article
hierarchy
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

12. Background Information
Painting of a fen landscape
A fen is one of the four main types of
wetland, and is usually fed by mineral-rich
surface water or groundwater
• Automatically link items to Wikipedia
articles that are related
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

13. Creating & Sharing
Leeds Town Hall
Similar Items
Keywords
Add to
Create your own Path!
Leeds City Art
Gallery – Entrance Workspace
Search facets
Leeds City Art Thesauri /
Gallery - Interior Vocabularies
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

14. Evaluation
• Just finished the first round of full-scale
evaluation (31 participants)
– Thumbnails a must (bigger is better)
– Contextual information appreciated
– Search / Browse patterns seem to be different
– Desires
• Paths that can branch
• On-line help
• Better integration
Digital Humanities Congress 2012, Sheffield, 6th – 8th September

15. Thank you for listening
Find out more at:
http://www.paths-project.eu
Try it out at:
http://prototype.paths-project.eu
m.mhall@sheffield.ac.uk
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework
Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 270082. We acknowledge the contribution of all project
partners involved in PATHS (see: http://www.paths-project.eu).